Observers said Republicans want to capitalize on voters’ antipathy toward
government spending by talking tough on the benefits, but Democrats have tried
to capitalize on their remarks.

“Other Republicans have reiterated this same argument that the [unemployment]
benefits create a disincentive,” said Terry Madonna, who directs the center for
politics at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “The mindset of
conservative Republicans running this year is much more an edge on debt,
deficit” at the expense of government benefits for the unemployed.

In Nevada, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) campaign has seized on
the remarks Angle made in May to KRNV, a Reno television station.

“You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting
one of those jobs that is an honest job, but it doesn’t pay as much,” Angle
said. “And so that’s what’s happened to us is that we have put in so much
entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry and
said you don’t want the jobs that are available.”

The Reid camp has tried to use the remarks to paint Angle as “just too
extreme."

In Kentucky, Democrat Jack Conway’s campaign has used Paul’s statements from a
June interview with WVLK-AM to accuse him of hypocrisy.

"As bad as it sounds, ultimately we do have to sometimes accept a wage
that's less than we had at our previous job in order to get back to work and
allow the economy to get started again," Paul said in the interview.
"Nobody likes that, but it may be one of the tough love things that has to
happen."

“He's fine with feeding at the federal trough himself,” Conway’s campaign said
in a statement. “He just doesn't want others, whether they be unemployed or the
farmers whose subsidies he wants to end, feeding by his side.”

It’s unclear whether the candidates’ remarks will doom their campaigns. At
least in Pennsylvania, Corbett’s controversial remarks about the unemployed
appear not to have adversely affected probable voters, as he still holds a
double-digit lead over Democrat Dan Onorato in the state’s gubernatorial race.

Corbett has a 49 to 39 percent lead over Onorato among 750 likely votes in a
Rasmussen Reports poll released Friday. The survey, which mirrors results from
June, was conducted July 14 — five days after Corbett said “the jobs are there”
and people just don’t want to work.

“People don’t want to come back to work while they still have some
unemployment,” he told Pennsylvania Public Radio on July 9. “That’s becoming a
problem.”

“The jobs are there, but if we keep extending unemployment, people are just
going to sit there,” he said.

Pennsylvania had a 9.2 percent unemployment rate last month.

Onorato has already used the comments in a Web ad. At an event on Friday in
Lancaster, Pa., he again hit Corbett for his comments.

“A Harrisburg insider like Tom Corbett who doesn’t even recognize the problems
families are facing will never be able to offer the solutions that Pennsylvania
needs,” Onorato said.

Madonna said Corbett’s remarks aren’t “going to defeat him,” but it has given
his Democratic rival the initiative.

“What he’s done is to give his opponent an opening, and his opponent is working
diligently to exploit it,” Madonna said. “It’s [Corbett’s] single most
important misstep as a candidate.”